On Wednesday, Lackawanna County started a doomsday clock for invasive AI hyperscale data center developers.

Commissioners Bill Gaughan, Thom Welby and Chris Chermak unanimously approved a contract for a scientific, data-driven forecast of the impacts the data center invasion would impose on the roughly 215,000 residents of the county and their neighbors throughout Northeast Pennsylvania.

The county will pay EmPower Analytics Group a flat fee of $165,000 — about 0.0912% of the county’s $181 million budget — to conduct the study, which will have a broader scope than the firm’s original proposal, an all-important examination of the cumulative health and economic effects of blighting the county with coughing clusters of data centers and natural gas power plants.

The version approved Wednesday also will detail impacts on individual communities. The report will be invaluable to municipal governments and citizens groups when most if not all of these benighted projects are tried in the courts. The resistance will have hard data to make their cases. So far, developers have shown a comical ineptitude at selling their toxic products to laymen and women. Judges are the toughest customers to convince.

Even the dimmest developer grasps this. As I opined in August, the developers’ best weapon is widespread public ignorance of the negative impacts of their ruinous, cartoonishly speculative industry. EmPower’s report will present a “Big Picture” perspective impossible for even the most jaded bystander to ignore. The more humans learn about the health, economic and environmental costs of invasive data center development, the more determined they become to keep it out of targeted communities.

EmPower was co-founded by Michael Cork, Ph.D., an environmental health scientist and biostatistician with a doctorate from Harvard. In July, Cork delivered a report commissioned by the crowd-funded grassroots group Stop Archbald Data Centers. The scientist focused on the Wildcat Ridge Data Center Campus, the most objectionable of six data center projects competing to erase Archbald.

Cork translated health damages into money — estimating an annual added cost between $3 million and $124 million, depending on how often and how long the project’s 588 “backup” diesel generators run and what mitigating technologies Brooklyn-based developers Cornell Realty Management LLC might eventually choose to use.

Cornell “experts” tried to discredit Cork’s testimony with semantics and misdirection, one of countless clumsy missteps the developer’s team made during the marathon conditional use hearing on the project. When trying to sell the ridiculous assertion that 588 diesel generators and millions of gallons of fuel stored onsite would pose no threat to neighbors, saying “Trust us” over and over just doesn’t cut it.

Cork’s original report considered the impacts of one data center proposal. Lackawanna County is targeted by more than a dozen such proposals and the power plants and other infrastructure required to feed data centers’ insatiable appetite for electricity, water and other precious resources.

When news of Cork’s report landed on traditional and digital doorsteps across the county, spooked citizens pressured Welby and Chermak to join Gaughan — who reached out to EmPower with their blessing — in commissioning a countywide study.

Welby and Chermak expressed “concern” over invasive data center development, but dragged their feet on securing a study, citing cost and lack of governmental authority to intervene as obstacles. Their votes Wednesday signal a shift in official attitudes that should be celebrated by citizens and feared by the developers targeting their communities.

The early cheerleading for data centers and the stubborn “bystanderism” that replaced it have succumbed to the practical and political realities of the moment. The public is overwhelmingly opposed to data center development, and even perceived support for it is toxic to politicians who want to win offices or hold onto them.

Gaughan thanked his colleagues for finally seeing the forest for the clear-cut trees and rightly acknowledged citizens who so far have shouldered and funded the resistance without uniform support from elected officials who swore oaths to serve the public interest.

“Government did not lead you here,” Gaughan said. “In many ways, you led government here. Today is not the end of this fight, but it is a really important day, because from this point forward when somebody tells the people of our county that there’s nothing to worry about, we will be able to say, ‘Don’t tell us, show us.’ And this time we will have the science, in 90 days, to decide for ourselves.”

EmPower’s report should be delivered by Christmas, an invaluable gift to the resistance and a mountainous lump of coal for developers. Their best weapon is widespread public ignorance of the negative impacts of their ruinous, cartoonishly speculative industry. While belated, the EmPower study couldn’t come at a better time.

Gaughan pointed to an April report by the American Lung Association that pegged data centers as a growing source of air pollution across the nation and warned that “communities located near large data center clusters often experience higher localized pollution burdens than regional averages.” He also noted that on Monday, President Donald Trump’s corrupt (redundant?) Environmental Protection Agency completed its repeal of Biden-era limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants.

At a time when governments at every level should be heightening and tightening environmental guardrails, the Trump administration is tearing them down for billionaire tech “broligarchs” who view everyday Americans as lower than cockroaches. The cavalry isn’t just sitting out the war, they’ve saddled up with the enemy.

I commend commissioners Welby and Chermak for voting to approve the EmPower contract. Better late than never. It was moving when Welby drew on personal experience to illustrate his support for the study. His nephew, Paul Welby, a Pennsylvania Army National Guard master sergeant who was exposed to toxic smoke from “burn pits” in Kuwait, passed away last month after a battle with esophageal cancer that spread throughout his body.

Paul Welby was 43.

In March 2004, then-Sunday Times Photo Director Mike Mullen and I spent a month embedded with Pennsylvania Army National Guard soldiers in Kuwait and Iraq. We saw and smelled the burn pits firsthand. It was obvious then that military personnel and civilians were being poisoned 24/7.

“Burn pits” doesn’t begin to describe their massive size and monumental toxicity. Some were the size of football fields filled with trash, plastic, construction rubble, ruined vehicles and human waste. They were doused in jet fuel and torched, fouling the air for miles around. Burn pits were also used in Afghanistan and were standard in the first Gulf War.

At the time, the government swore burn pits posed no long-term risk to soldiers and civilians, just like it did with Agent Orange, the “safe” chemical defoliant that is still killing Vietnam veterans.

“We thought he was going to recover,” Welby said of his nephew. “He didn’t. But those burn pits weren’t a safety issue? Excuse my language, but (expletive).”

You can guess what he said. Call it indecorous, but it was the right word at the right time. I applaud Welby for using it.

Hyperscale data centers and massive power plants are obviously not as toxic as Agent Orange or burn pits torched with jet fuel, but Welby’s comparison is apt for obvious reasons. The federal government now grudgingly admits that its assurances about the safety of burn pits and Agent Orange were worthless. That’s cold comfort for the sick and the dead and the living who love them.

The assurances of invasive data center developers are just as empty, an ugly truth that will almost certainly be exposed by the EmPower study. I’m no scientist, but common sense, personal experience and everything I’ve read and reported on data centers and natural gas power plants predicts that the EmPower study will inevitably out the data center invasion as an environmental and economic disaster for human beings who don’t share the legendary survival skills of cockroaches in apocalyptic environments.

When human beings across the county, region and state see the data center invasion’s widespread health and economic costs laid bare in black and white, the resistance will mushroom overnight. The EmPower report is locally focused, but it will no doubt be cited and emulated far and wide.

“It’s going to give us information, or something that we can use to present information,” Welby said. “I think it’s going to scare the crap out of anyone that reads it.”

Count on that.

Tick, tick, tick …

CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, likes it when officials empower the constituents who put them in power. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky